Froglet update

+picture books recs from Harriet and Belle

Greetings Frog Troublers, and welcome to our new readers!

This free newsletter started as a way for me (Belle) to record conversations about and experiences with nature, the environment, and the climate crisis with my daughters, Beatrice (now 9) and Harriet (now 5). It’s evolved over 2+ years to become a place where we each share our love of nature, but also local and state-level civics and politics, crafts we invented or learned, books we can’t put down… and of course the latest on the frogs in our lives. We have a lot of local (Chatham County, NC) readers, but also friends in Virginia, California, New York, Montana, Texas, England, and India! We read every comment together.

Today, we’ve got a mix of things to share: some frog news, two picture books Harriet and I love, and a nature hike that turned into a craft.

First up: the frogs. I always appreciate being edited by talented, sharp-eyed editors, not only because it makes the work clearer and stronger, but also because the resulting redlines become great show-and-tells for my students. This week in my intro to creative writing class, we’re working on revising and editing personal essays. I’ll show my students how many edits, questions, comments, and fact checks went into my short piece—and I’ll tell them how the overall process was positive, learning experience for me.

That doesn’t mean I agree with every edit. For example, the New York Times edit referred to Moms for Liberty as a “conservative parental rights group.” My original version referred to them as an “extremist” and “right-wing,” which I think is closer to the truth. (Merriam-Webster defines “conservative” as “tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions,” which is not how I’d define a group that has advocated, among other things, for the abolition of the Department of Education.)

In making the essay more streamlined, we also lost some frog content—specifically, about the conditions we look for when rescuing tadpoles. We only take tadpoles from puddles we know will dry up before the tads can reach froglet stage, because we know their natural environment (and less handling from humans) is best. Generally, these tadpole-laden puddles occur in a gravel parking lot close to our favorite swimming hole on the Haw River—for some reason, the frog moms here make “bad life choices,” as Bea says. Our house is very close to this swim spot (less than a quarter mile), so we’re also not removing them from their native habitat or disrupting our own ecosystem.

We watch the tadpoles carefully, and return them to a nearby healthy stream or pond—sometimes when they’re fully developed, sometimes when they’re still in tadpole stage. It can take three months to go from egg to frog (!).

Our current clutch of tadpoles were rescued from an almost completely dried-up puddle on July 27—they were flopping and wiggling in a slick of mud, and Harriet and I happened to have a jar and some water when we discovered them. We brought them home, filled a pink baby pool with well water, and dumped them into it.

The baby pool, a habitat idea we copied from our neighbor Ellen, has been a great environment for them—it’s large enough that they all have plenty of room to swim and nibble the lettuce we feed them, but the best part is that it allows the developing froglets the ability to transition to an amphibian (part-land, part-water) habitat. We set the pool on a slanted part of the yard, so that some of it is deeper while the higher-elevation part is shallow. We stacked rocks in the shallow end so the froglets could climb out, but we also started noticing one froglet who likes to perch on the edge of the pool:

And here are the books Harriet and I have loved the most this week:

The Book of Turtles, by Sy Montgomery and Matt Patterson, is a beautiful, fascinating nonfiction book about the fascinating (and sometimes very long) lives of turtles. We borrowed this book from the library and have loved reading it and looking at the illustrations and photos.

My Kindergarten by Rosemary Wells takes you through a year in a tiny elementary school on Cranberry Island, Maine. The illustrations are beautiful, it’s full of songs and rhymes, and the depiction of a kindergarten year is just so sweet and nostalgic. We first checked this book out from the library, but loved it so much we got our own copy (used, from Thriftbooks). “I think that it’s very sweet, funny, interesting, and pretty,” says Harriet. “It’s just such a special book.”

Harriet and I decided after reading about the “weeds and seeds” club in My Kindergarten that we would go on a hike, collecting as many beautiful seed pods, leaves, stones, and shells as we could. We took a hike today with her friend Emerald, and they found acorns, pine cones, black walnuts, flowers… and some mussel and clam shells from the river. We collected every pretty thing we could find into a cloth bag, then brought it back home and unpacked it. Emerald and Harriet made beautiful arrangements with their finds, like this one:

Having a goal (finding beautiful items on our hike) made it easier to stay focused during our 2+ mile journey, and it also helped to have something to look forward to (unpacking and arranging). Because it’s not always easy to leave a scene like this:

Nor should it be! But, you have to go home sometime.

We’ll be back later this week with a post about the what happens at school board meetings, and why you should go to yours (if you can).

See you then, Frog Troublers! Also, we’re curious—do you ever go to school board meetings in your county? Do you have questions for us about how to give public comment or show teachers in your county that you’ve got their backs?